!Mediengruppe Bitnik. is anyone home lolLauren Huret. Artificial Fear Intelligence of Death

What happens, when machines imitate human thinking, emulate creative work and become intelligent? Who acts and who takes responsibility, when humans hand over more and more to algorithms, networks and «intelligent» Systems? Speech recognition in smartphones, search engines, automatic translation – forms of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are already part of our every-day life. Kunsthaus Langenthal presents two new projects by Swiss artists, working on these questions.

In their new project for Kunsthaus Langenthal, !Mediengruppe Bitnik uses Bots, that is, programmes executing automatic tasks, thereby often simulating human activity. In their project, tens of thousands of Bots, hacked from a dating platform, where they feign female users, will emerge as a liberated mass of artificial chat partners.

Lauren Hurets (*1984) intense research on AI led her to California, where she discussed where she conducted interviews with four protagonists of the discourse: Programmer and entrepreneur Monica Anderson (Artificial Intuition), computer historian Dag Spicer (Computer History Museum), writer and editor R.U. Sirius (MONDO 2000) and writer Erik Davis (TechGnosis.Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information), discussing, among others, emotional relations between human beings and machines.In her new video work, Lauren Huret complements these conversations on the past and present of AI with digital collages based on images from computer magazines of the 1970s and 1980s.

An artist's book accompanies the exhibtion, with Lauren Huret's interviews with Monica Anderson, Erik Davis, R. U. Sirius and Dag Spicer, published as Print on Demand and PDF-eBook (download here) with LINK Editions.